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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Milkyway@home on Raspberry Pi (FAILED)

Tuesday Oct 9th:

Found out yesterday that there are a few other projects that offer files which you yourself can compile to customize it for your own system. These even work on ARM processors ( the big hurdle towards crunching boinc projects on the Raspberry Pi). One of which is Milky way @ home, so I got to work on it last night, only to realize somehow the whole boinc client and manager pair was FUBAR. After trouble shooting, googling, and searching even more, I realized that the authorization configuration file was to blame.

Through trying to get things to work, somehow I wound up with copies of the authorization file all over the place on my Pi. And the one everyone said was important oddly seemed to be blank. ( Hard to have a password in a file, when there is nothing in the file!) So I did a complete wipe of everything boinc related on my Pi, then reinstalled the client and manager. This time it was able to connect to the client host, so success on that front.

Then I attached to Milkyway@home, and got the usual message that my arm-linux-unknown type CPU was not supported. I was not shocked, I had this next trick up my sleeve.

sudo apt-get install boinc-app-milkyway

Running that in the terminal and installing the source code for the milkyway project. I went back to the GUI manager, and clicked update on Milkyway@home. Going to the event log one of my best friends when trouble shooting BOINC, I see a red message and my heart sinks. But I read the message, and got very excited all of sudden, it was not about an unknown and unsupported processor. It was that I had a lack of disk space to download a task for the project. Changed settings, and I still was slightly short, so I cleared out a few Raspberry Pi programs I have no intent in using for awhile, the big one that cleared quite a bit of space was "Scratch" sorry MIT but if I am going to code I am going to relearn a far more substantial programming language such as C++, Java, or Python.

Hit the update button again, hopped over to the event log and saw this glorious message : "got 1 new tasks." While it gives an ETA of 36 hours or so, not shocking due to the hardware on the Raspberry Pi.The Bad:

Things seemed good I watched it crunch for 10-20 minutes with no issues. Switched off the screen and went to work on other items. Checked back a few hours later, and it said that it had only crunched for "1 hour" thinking that's not right, I checked if the raspberry pi was going to sleep or some other sort of standby, found no such sign. But in the event log there was a troubling set of notices. It seemed for nearly 10 minutes, every 30 seconds or so the task would get reset. Then after that 10 minutes the task would abort as failed.

While I can not know this for certain, it is my belief that why the project curnches fine for roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes, is I believe that is when the project reaches its first check point. When it hits that check point, it runs into a bunch of errors, and freaks out so to speak.

So while I had a lot of hope, they were dashed as while I can get projects and have them start crunching with Milkyway @ home, I have not been able to get one to complete. ( I ran it for a half a day, and each task it got ran into the same issues).